Asus AGP-V7700 Pure Review – THG.RU

Introduction

Since the release of our first two GeForce2 articles, Tom’s Take On NVIDIA’s New GeForce2 GTS and NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS Battle Royal, two questions continue to cloud the issue, “Is the GeForce2, really, worth getting? If it is, what brand do you recommend of all the available cards?” With this latest update, the Asus AGP-V7700 Pure GeForce2 review, I hope to take the smoke and mirrors out of the equitation to make the purchasing decision easier. Detailed Information will be provided on availability, package contents, performance, pricing, stability, unique features and odd quirks with our review board. Most of the little things are what will likely be setting each card apart from one another in this comparison. Asus is hoping to have enough of these small jabs and land the knockout punch to become our new GeForce2 champion.

The Chipset

Unless you’ve been disconnected from the net for a while now, you should know that the GeForce2 is NVIDIA’s latest and greatest graphics chipset that has all the bells and whistles that crown it currently the best 3D consumer graphics solution on the market. The chipset features high fill-rates, faster than ever T&L (thanks to an increase core clock speed), highest clocked DDR memory available, Full Scene Anti Aliasing and the extremely solid DirectX and OpenGL driver support from one of the best driver development teams in the graphics industry, period. The combination of all these factors elevates this chipset to what is currently the best in the consumer graphics world. For greater detail on this chipset, I encourage you to read Tom’s Take On NVIDIA’s New GeForce2 GTS.

How Much Better?

The lingering decision for many folks is if they should replace their previous graphics solution for the newest board on the block at the cost of $350-400. Many of you are reluctant to do so and have every reason to be since the cost difference between a GeForce DDR (available for about $220) and the GeForce2 is huge. In our previous GeForce2 round up we found that the GeForce performed very well until we began hitting high resolutions that began to take its toll on the GeForce fill-rate and allowed the faster clocked GeForce2 to take a respectable performance lead. My outlook on this issue is pretty simple. If you are on a budget or have a GeForce board and are happy, stick with the GeForce. Don’t feel like you’re settling for “just some video card” as recently John Carmack from ID Software stated, “GeForce is my baseline for current rendering work, so I can wholeheartedly recommend it.” If Leading edge game programmers such as Mr. Carmack are reccomending this board, you can feel confident that upcoming games will be playing very well on it. However, if you have the money to spend and need more graphics processing power or must have the best then the GeForce2 GTS is for you. For me the move to a GeForce2 meant I could play Quake 3 at 1024x768x32 at the constant high frame rate that I must have when playing so it wasn’t too difficult of a decision. Later on in the review you can take a peek at how the GeForce compares and come to your own conclusion on this issue as well.

Asus AGP-V7700 Pure

The Asus V7700 should be appearing in the US next week if not already as Asus planned to release on the 3rd week of May. The Pure version of the V7700 retail box will be selling for $349 and comes with the Asus AGP-V7700 itself, the very detailed manual, Asus video drivers (based on NVIDIA 5.16 reference drivers), an overclocking utility, DVD player, two full games (Drakan, Rollcage), and a sampler CD. A Deluxe version should follow sometime in the near future offering more features like VR Glasses support, Video in and Video out but will of course come at a higher cost.

Asus has always been known to go above and beyond the competition when it comes to the quality of their product as they put extra development time into their custom designs. This time around about the only noticeable feature that you can see on this board is the slightly improved thermal solution over the reference design that most companies are using. Keep in mind that this is the “Pure” version that Asus makes and does not come with any type of video in or out. I also noticed that the backside of the board didn’t come with a connection for the VR Glasses so I’m a bit puzzled as to if they will support this feature as they claim to be able to on their website but not on the retail box itself. Regardless the board layout looked clean and on par with what you would normally expect from Asus.

The package comes bundled with a couple of utilities that caught my eye, Asus Smart Doctor and Tweak utility. The Smart Doctor software is very useful as it gives you voltage and thermal information (see below).

Asus AGP-V7700 Pure, Continued

After seeing many people go through much grief troubleshooting crashing problems on their various platforms, this utility may offer some relief and come in very handy when checking if the motherboard is supplying the proper power required by the GeForce2 board. I decided to do a couple of tests with the thermal portion of the utility by checking the fan speed monitor and check the accuracy of the heat displayed. Obviously fans aren’t going to live forever so if it died, I’m sure you’d want to know. I tapped on my fan and within a few seconds the monitor registered that the average fan speed had decreased. Smart Doctor also has a built in warning system if your card should even reach its thermal limits and display a warning. The next little test I had was to measure the heat on the back of the die using my laser thermometer and compare it to the displayed measurement in Smart Doctor. The utility was off by a few degrees Celsius but that shouldn’t be too big of a deal as its close enough to tell you when there are major problems.

Another item included that stood about the rest was the Asus manual for the V7700. The manual even surpassed the detail of Leadtek’s WFGF2 as it not only went over the basic details of installation but offered an incredible amount of detail on every driver setting, detailed usage of each utility and DVD player. Some people might not appreciate this but I certainly did as it answered many questions that I feel most people would care to know about when tweaking their video driver. By far the best supporting material I’ve seen packaged with a graphics board.

The DVD player was tested and everything worked well as the player offered all the standard features and adjustments that most will need when watching a DVD movie on their PC. Just remember that this Pure version will be unable to play these movies on a TV as there is no video out.

Asus V7700 Software Driver

Here we have the basic main information sheet that comes in about all drivers today. It usually comes in useful for troubleshooting purposes.

Color Adjustments for the Desktop, D3D, OpenGL and Video output. You can setup color schemes for various applications or just set them in general.

The Asus Display property window allows you to adjust screen positioning in VGA mode as well as Video mode. You can also reach some detailed refresh settings from here.

Asus V7700 Software Driver, Continued

If you’re as strict on having a particular refresh setting in all resolution and color depths then this option screen will be a blessing to you as well.

Here you have the main D3D property window. Most of the regularly used adjustments are deeper into the D3D options.

The popular FSAA and VSYNC options can be found here.

All of the available OpenGL settings can be adjust in this window.

The tweak utility is very basic but it does what you need it to do. I do want to note that the utility is limited to 365MHz memory speed setting when the card was capable of higher settings. That was a bit disappointing.

Competition

For a recap of what we’ve observed on the previous GeForce2 boards reviewed, please refer to the links below.

• AOpen PA256 Pro
• ELSA Gladiac
• Leadtek WinFast GeForce2 GTS

Contestant Overview

* Not in retail box but can be requested through technical support.

What about 3dfx and the other guys?

One of the most annoying questions I must answer on a daily basis is that of our status on a 3dfx p/review. Unfortunately 3dfx has yet to extend an offer to us to take a preview of their VD4-5 products. It makes me wonder if they have something to fear in showing us their unreleased products, as we’re basically the only site that isn’t afraid to tell anyone what we really think. We’ll purchase one whenever it becomes available in the future but until then we’ll have to wait and see if they can get enough courage to send us a sample for a real preview.

As for the rest of the competing chipsets you can refer back to Tom’s review of the GeForce2 chipset for detailed analysis and comparisons.

Performance – Test Setup

Performance Expectations

As in our last review I don’t expect to see much variance aside from the typical margin of error when running tests. All of the contestants are based no the exact same reference driver so unless a manufacturer decided to be especially brave and try aggressive settings, I doubt we’ll see a clear performance winner.

Performance Results – Quake3 Demo001

Quake 3 using the Normal setting doesn’t prove to be much of a challenge to any of the cards but does show a couple of noteworthy things. The first was the fact that the Asus V7700 is performing just the same as the rest of the pack. The second note was that you’d see good proof as to why a GeForce2 would be useful at the 1024x768x16 resolution. Where the GeForce offered a good 85 FPS average, the GeForce2 pushed well over 100 FPS. So that’s overkill right? Not really. It also provides you with a minimum framerate that is probably no lower than 80 FPS where the GeForce might drop somewhere in the 60 range. That might seem a bit odd but most of our veteran Quake players will follow what I’m getting at.

Competition looks a bit tight here even for the GeForce board. I would still pick the performance of the GeForce2 group but the GeForce board isn’t performing too shabby.

For fun, I decided to see how combining FSAA and High Quality settings would change things. As you can see I was forced to use lower resolutions for any meaningful results as the performance drops tremendously as the resolution rises. At 640×480 there is no question that the GeForce2 competitors are all working at a playable level but as we climb in resolutions they all fall off dramatically to an unusable status.

Performance Results – Quake3 NV15DEMO

The results in this test are a bit misleading as Quake3 isn’t the most efficient program at using T&L. Now before you all send off an e-mail, please consider that unnamed sources from other graphics companies have agreed with this statement saying that the game was not created to work with a T&L unit this powerful. Hopefully ID Software can shed some light on this in the near future, as results we’re seeing in this testing don’t make much sense at all.

Even with the higher demand color depths we’re still seeing the same confusion, as the T&L units must be very busy but not working very efficiently with the software.

Adding FSAA and High Quality mode has pushed the fill-rate requirements up tremendously. You can see the performance gaps increase between the GeForce2 cards and the older GeForce because of it.

Performance Results – 3DMark 2000 Game1

Here we have 3DMark 2000 running off of the MaxFX Technology and DirectX 7. Apparently Remedy had planned on having their graphics engine efficiently utilize the dedicated T&L engine as we can see by the scores that they did a good job at it. We can see the fill demands aren’t that great but the GeForce2’s still manage to put some good distance between it and the GeForce board. This is most likely due to the High Detail settings I chose to test with that require much stronger T&L performance. At 640×480 (fill rate isn’t an issue) on most tests the GeForce typically was right with the GeForce2 group but not this time because of the higher T&L requirements.

Once again we see the GeForce2 boards stay on top of things thanks to the T&L friendly graphics engine. The 1600x1200x32 tests were not run because none of the boards were able to.

Performance – Overclocking

The Leadtek board is still the fastest board I have thanks to the memory being so overclock friendly. I can’t really credit the board design for this feat so other people might see varying results. The biggest thing to note from my overclocking findings is that the core being overclocked helped VERY little while the memory directly affected performance greatly. For example the core being overclocked 20% would increase performance at most 1% while the memory being overclocked 10% would show much larger gains. This is solid proof that one of the GeForce2’s biggest problems right now is memory bandwidth.

Thermal measurements were taken while normal and overclocked testing was done. Here is an updated chart with the Asus V7700 added. You’ll notice that the slightly better than reference cooling solution of the Asus board didn’t really help too much in terms of keeping the board at a much lower temperature like the Leadtek board did. It did however keep it from being the hottest solution so it is at least on par with the rest of the group.

Performance – Afterthoughts

After looking over all our performance numbers we can once again be sure that no matter what GeForce2 board you decided to go with, they all perform nearly identical in 3D. The most useful information that you will probably get from the data provided is the performance difference between the GeForce and GeForce2. Looking over the data will give you a chance to see how much more you’ll get for your money. Unfortunately right now there really isn’t a huge advantage going with the GeForce2 and it may only appeal to die hard users like myself.

BX Overclocking

During my first GeForce round up we found all the boards to run software (Quake 3) over a reasonable period of time (1 hour) perfectly stable on my Microstar BX board. Nothing changed when I swapped in the Asus V7700 graphics card for an hour of continuous Quake3 play. No lockups, odd boots or visual effects occurred. I feel confident that the Asus board will have no problems in a BX motherboard running the 133MHz bus setting.

Conclusion

The Asus AGP-V7700 is now available offering Asus quality hardware, a couple of useful utilities, an excellent owners manual and a few free games. All this is offered at the same price as the competition at $349.

A brief overview of each of the other competing GeForce2 graphics cards can be found here.

The contestants in this comparison are all very close together from price to performance. The things that currently place each competitor apart from the others are added features; as quality, performance and cost are essentially dead even. Although Asus made a strong effort to obtain the title of the best GeForce2 card and had a few minor perks over my previous winner the Leadtek WFGF2, it fell short of the Leadtek board as it missed the major feature of video out that Leadtek offers. Although the prices are dead even among this group, the Leadtek just flat out offers more bang for the buck and that’s why it’s still my choice for best GeForce2 solution available.